1. Field of Disclosure
The present disclosure generally relates to improving the linearity of an electronic circuit and including nonlinear capacitance compensation to improve the linearity of a digital-to-analog converter (DAC).
2. Related Art
The continued improvement of the semiconductor fabrication process has allowed manufacturers and designers to create smaller and more powerful electronic devices. These electronic devices have higher speed, more density, and consume less power than their predecessors. In its infancy, manufacturers and designers used a 10 μM semiconductor fabrication process while a 5 nm semiconductor fabrication process is contemplated in the future with the surface area of each node being halved every two years. These earlier semiconductor fabrication processes have allowed manufacturers and designers to place a few thousand semiconductor devices, such as transistors, onto a semiconductor substrate while newer semiconductor fabrication processes allow placement of more than a hundred million semiconductor devices onto the same size semiconductor substrate.
Ideally, these semiconductor devices operate in a linear manner having responses that are directly proportional to their stimuli. However, in practice, the semiconductor fabrication process often introduces unwanted capacitances, often referred to as parasitic capacitances, into the transistors as well as the interconnections between these transistors. These parasitic capacitances can affect the linearity of the electronic device. For example, a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) is an electronic circuit that converts a digital input signal from a digital representation in a digital signaling domain to an analog representation in the analog signaling domain to provide an analog output signal. Ideally, this DAC exhibits a linear input/output relationship such that the analog output signal is directly proportional to the digital input signal. However, in practice, the parasitic capacitances of the transistors of the DAC often introduce non-linearities into the DAC causing the analog output signal to no longer be directly proportional to the digital input signal making the analog output signal less predictable.